Monday, April 17, 2017

Now that the Truckers Strike has Reached Moscow, Will Western Media At Last Pay Attention?

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 17 – The Kremlin has
imposed a media blackout on the Russian truckers’ strike that is now in its third
week and has been joined by drivers in at least 80 federal subjects, but
unfortunately, coverage of this worker action by the Western media has been
almost as sparse.

On the one hand, this reflects the
Kremlin’s ability to keep the story out of all but a few Moscow outlets on
which Western journalists typically rely and the fact that the most important
centers of the strike – in the North Caucasus, the Far East and Karelia – are far
from the Russian capital.

And on the other hand, it also
reflects the tendency of Western outlets to devote enormous attention to
actions by small groups of liberal intellectuals and political opponents of
Vladimir Putin rather than much at all to the far larger economic and
increasingly political protests of workers like the long-haul truckers.

The truckers deserve such coverage
not only because of the size of their protest but because the leaders of their
movement are often delivering political messages more significant than those
offered by the more mediagenic intellectual demonstrators.

One of their number, for example,
pointed out that “the biggest problem” of Russia is that “there is no society
or structures of society. [Instead, the country’s current leadership] has
destroyed it as a class,” much as Soviet leaders claimed to have destroyed this
or that “class” in the past (ehorussia.com/new/node/14072).

“We need a trade union,” he
continued, “but no one wants to take part in it” because the dispersal of the
previous protests and “the absence of normal political system within the system”
has taught people that “it is useless to struggle.”“People simply don’t believe that it is
possible to defeat this monster” consisting of the Kremlin and the Russian
legislature.

Their lack of such belief, he said, “arises
from our television, from the federal channels” which everyone watches and
which promote the idea that fighting the system is a hopeless enterprise.It would be too bad if Western media outlets
would convey the same image of Russia and Russians to their audiences.